


Fearless, and Therefore Powerful

by Ellerigby13



Series: love lives beyond the tomb [2]
Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley, Penny Dreadful (TV), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Childhood Friends, Crack, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Growing Up, Pining, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:26:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26928091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellerigby13/pseuds/Ellerigby13
Summary: Darcy has always dreamt of walking among the stars, discovering planets, naming supernovas after the people she has loved.  Among them, one fiery American who seeks to cure her patients of death, and one dear friend who seeks to end death altogether.
Relationships: Jane Foster & Darcy Lewis, Victor Frankenstein/Darcy Lewis
Series: love lives beyond the tomb [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960432
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	Fearless, and Therefore Powerful

**Author's Note:**

> I can't help myself. Historically inaccurate, but I'm doing research. Hope you enjoy.

_“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”_ _  
_ _-_ **_Frankenstein_ ** _, Mary Shelley_

* * *

**before**

They were beyond the ages requiring a governess, so in the fall Victor was sent to college while Darcy remained at home pretending to learn sewing from her mother and dreaming of loftier things: exploration, piracy, adventure - planting her feet on the moon and leaping into the cosmos, as if she could sail the skies the way some men sailed the sea.

Not that she could share any of this with her mother. Since Father had died, taking with him their nights of peering into the heavens with his telescope, Aisling Lewis had no patience for hearing her rattle off the names of the constellations or the stars they belonged to. She would be far less impressed to listen to Darcy identify Bellatrix or Canis Minor than to hear her name a single type of stitch.

“For God’s sake, Darcy,” she’d warble, exhausted, finding her daughter mapping out the skies by the window in the dead of night, “how d’you expect to keep a household if you’re awake to the crack of dawn every day?”

When she wrote Victor (sometimes nearly every week, sometimes with months between), she told him of her yearning, her dreams of flying away to lose herself in the stars. He wrote back of his, to cross the gossamer threads between life and death and reach across the abyss for his mother’s hand. Sometimes Darcy took his letters with her to the windowsill, prayed to whomever might be listening beyond the moon that they might both earn their wishes.

He came home when the drizzling rains of April folded into cautious spring sunlight, and during the summers, he and Darcy spent their days colluding over their futures in the fields between their family homes.

“My professors are useless,” Victor would lament, lying beside her as she fiddled with the telescope her father had gifted her one birthday, aiming it above them. “What academia lacks in ambition, it certainly makes up for in pomposity.”

“Do I detect a note of discouragement?” She glanced over her shoulder to grin at him, nudging his leg with her toe. “You’re not allowed to complain about something I will never see, you know. Or else I’ll bother you to teach me as you’re being taught every moment we’re together.”

“Then I suppose I’ll just take you to school with me,” he teased, the whine in his voice replaced by fondness. “At least then I’ll have someone who understands the most basic need humanity should have, of advancement. Innovation.” She watched a smile tug on the corners of his lips, but he didn’t turn his head to face her, eyes forward on the stars. “Beauty.”

“Is Manchester beautiful?” she whispered. A tender breeze blew her voice toward him, blending the pale cornflowers from her side of the field into the narcissus on his. Of its own accord, the hand that lay flat between them flipped its palm upward, and she let it fall those sparse centimetres closer to his.

He looked at her now, a blush creeping onto his neck illuminated by the moonlight, his lashes long and hopeful. “Not nearly so beautiful as here.”

As headstrong and wilful as she might have been, as many planets as she strove to conquer and skies as she planned to glide across, she was not yet bold enough to take him by the hand and kiss him the way she wanted. If she were a mite more courageous, she might have threaded her fingers through his hair and strummed the shell of his ear with her thumb, made him hold her until the night turned to dawn.

Instead, she closed her eyes, and settled for lacing his fingers between hers, her telescope against her chest. “When you go back for good, promise you’ll take me away, Victor. So I can learn, too.”

His fingers tightened over hers. “I will.”

* * *

**london**

Dr. Jane Foster blazed into her life when Darcy was nineteen, on a day trip she and her cousin had taken into the city. And she was unlike any girl she had known, the books in her arms nearly towering over her petite frame. Able to recall any disease in Latin, able to name the cure for any affliction which could be cured, and some that might not, all in the rapid tattoo of her American accent.

When they met, Jane’s texts had spilled open across the cobblestone, and as Darcy knelt to help her pick them up, avoiding as best as she could the bustling carts on the street, her gaze lingered on the anatomical sketch of a human torso.

“Are you a doctor?”

“Nurse, technically.” Her hair was coming out of its pins, and the circles under her eyes told Darcy she hadn’t slept in some time. The harried appearance reminded her immediately of Victor. Her letters to him had gone unanswered the last two years. “My...mentor, if you can call him that, is a drunk, and leaves his work to me. He can hardly lift his hand to sign a prescription.”

“Sounds to me like he ought to pass you his title to go with your responsibilities.” Darcy folded closed the tome that she’d picked up, and placed it back carefully in the woman’s arms. “And what shall we call you when he does?”

The woman smiled and extended a gloveless hand toward her. “Doctor Foster. Doctor Jane Foster.”

Darcy took it brightly and shook. “Darcy Lewis.”

They moved into a bare bones flat on the South Bank together the following month, under the guise that Jane’s mentor needed to house her closer to him. So Jane continued her studies with her doctor as her mentor, and Darcy took a job as governess to a small businessman and his family. And though between them they didn’t have enough shillings to rub together for a lamb dinner, their days passed with joy.

Their nights, on the other hand, passed with as much schooling as they could offer one another.

“Maria Mitchell was the first woman to discover her own comet.” Some days she took her telescope off the shelf, knowing that she couldn’t hardly find a single star through the thick London fog, and sat with Jane on the floor by their only window to wish for the naked moonlight. “I intend to be the next.”

And while Jane seemed absorbed in her work at every turn, she kept conversation easily. “They’ll name it for you when you find it. Lewis’ Comet. And I…” Her pen scritched unyielding at the sheets of her journal. “...will wear my name across the cures for pneumonia, cholera, haemophilia, and tuberculosis…”

Darcy leaned across Jane’s shoulder to peek at her notes. “If you get more than one disease, then I get more than one comet. In fact, if you get different diseases, I get comets _and_ nebulas. And at least one star.”

“You’re allowed one of each,” Jane mused, her temple bumping to Darcy’s while she got to work diagramming the afflictions a lung could undergo, and the components that would heal them. “So long as you promise me one thing.”

“And what’s that?”

“That when your inevitable charm draws the attention of the kind of man who deserves you, your discoveries keep your name. Not his.”

Before she could stop herself thinking of it, Victor’s face rushed to the forefront of her mind. She knew that if he were alive, something no one was sure of in his family or hers, and if he’d be willing to have her after all these years, it would be second nature to him that she should claim her discoveries, as he would claim his own.

* * *

**what death can join together**

After two short years into her trade, Mr. Collins’ boys, Thomas and Edward shipped off to Eton to be indoctrinated into the graces of politics, pranks, and other very male facets of socio-academic aptitude. With some polite remorse, Mr. Collins lowered his eyes as he paid Darcy for the final time, thanking her for service to his family.

“I have something,” Jane said with some trepidation, when they were both home and Darcy had announced her predicament. She was pacing across their kitchen now, fixing a spot of tea with her brows knitted tight together. “But I don’t particularly care for it, for you.”

“Well, I can’t exactly wait to find another family straightaway and see whether I’m a good match for them, can I?” Darcy, meanwhile, had pulled all the pins out of her hair and was scrubbing her hands through her scalp, trying to put it all back up together. “What’s the job?”

“Caretaker. With me, in the consumption ward.” The high, urgent whistle of the kettle on the stove drew a shiver from Jane’s small frame, though her hands didn’t shake while she poured a cup for her friend, and another for herself. “You’ll have training once you start, naturally, but your experience taking care of the children should already put you in good standing. Plus, I suppose I could put in a good word.”

A spark of tentative excitement flared in Darcy’s chest. “You’d do that?”

“I don’t want to.” While the words came from her mouth cold and sharp, there was nothing but softness in Jane’s face. “It’s dangerous. We’re at enough risk with me bringing home the awful stench every night, and I’d never forgive myself if...if something were to happen.”

Darcy set down her teacup, getting to her feet to press a gentle hand over Jane’s. “You are my truest friend, Jane. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t met you. But I’d like the opportunity to live long enough to die sick, before either of us starve.” A half-smile rose to her friend’s lips, and Darcy found herself matching it. “Do you trust me?”

“Of course.”

They rose the next morning before dawn cracked over the Thames. Darcy’s training came in the form of Doctor Edmund, a tall, spindly wisp of a man with a greasy black moustache, pushing a plain white uniform on her once she’d introduced herself, and nodding toward the broom cupboard.

“You’ll find what you need to clean up in there. You’ll be under the charge of Nurse Foster in the south ward, she can fill you in on the particulars. But your job title is cleaning, redressing, and making your patients comfortable. See to it that you gain expertise in all.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, before Jane swept her off to the south ward.

In fairness, it wasn’t awful. The room certainly smelt of death, and the front of her smock stained bright red when she slipped a soiled pillow away from a frail man curled into the fetal position, but at least the windows looked out onto the river, and she had a few good conversations while changing the dressings of her patients. Her favourite so far was a middle aged woman who reminded her a bit of her Aunt Norah, with teeth a little too big for her mouth and one eye darker than the other.

“You’re a damn sight nicer than me ‘usband,” the woman, Louise, rasped without preamble. “Granted, he’s not visited the whole time I been here. Reckon he’s traded me in for somethin’ young and pretty yet?”

“Not you, Louise.” Darcy flashed as kind a smile as she could as she dabbed away the blood dribbling down her chin. “I’m sure he’s just too nervous to see his new competition, what with all the handsome lads around here fighting for your attention.”

“You’re one of them silver tongued ones. Real danger ‘round here.” She surveyed Darcy with her lighter eye, feigning suspicion. “Maybe you’re the one stealin’ me husband, eh?”

Her sympathetic smile turned soft and genuine. “I would never, Lou.”

One day blended into the next. It was nice having a routine, one where she could spend a little time with Jane in their rare solemn moments, but by the time she crossed the threshold out into the cooling London night air from the hospital, she was ready to drop on the spot. Each day her feet ached something awful, but she didn’t have time to worry over it, barely enough energy to eat before she nodded off.

On the upside, this much work meant a significant amount more money than she’d earned as a governess. She was already saving up for a trip to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

“My father used to take us when we were children,” she whispered one night, head buried in Jane’s shoulder on the small bed they shared by the window. She didn’t know whether Jane had already fallen asleep yet, but it was comforting to pretend, at least, that she was listening. “Victor and I...we would terrorize him on the carriage rides. Nearly drove him mad, I’m sure of it.”

In a tender, sleepy voice, Jane said, “where is he?”

“My father? Died, when I was younger.”

“Not your father, your friend. Victor.”

Her heart stuttered over hearing Jane say his name, as if by hearing it from her mouth, he was no longer a distant memory but the boy of her girlhood, a breath’s reach away. The truth was, she hadn’t heard from him in years, hadn’t seen him in more. And as little as she told Jane about him, her heart longed to hold his slender fingers between hers, to take her chance this time and kiss him until they forgot their own names.

“I don’t know,” she said, resting her palm against her chest. “He went away to study, stayed away to work...stopped writing when I got _here_...and I still think of him every day.” She didn’t realize she’d been crying until Jane reached up to brush the tears away with her thumb. “I’m sorry, it’s a bit silly...I’m sure he’s made all his discoveries and found a Mrs. Frankenstein by now, all too successful and busy with his grand adventures to write back.”

Jane’s hand was in her hair now, fingers brushing soothingly to her scalp to rock her to sleep. “He’s the silly one, for leaving you behind. And if there is a Mrs. Frankenstein, I’m sure she’s as pretty as a brick wall, and just as intelligent.”

Darcy smiled, eyes fluttering shut. She might have whispered a soft, “thank you” before falling asleep, but if she did she couldn’t remember.

Spring blurred foggily into fall. Patients trudged in and out of the ward, the new entries distinguishable only by the fact that they were slightly less bloodstained than the ones who exited. Lou’s condition steadily declined, though she pretended not to notice every time Darcy snuck in a round of cards when the doctors weren’t looking.

“I’ll live forever, you know. Have to collect the thirty quid you owe me, your shite bridge playing and all.” Her chin, which was once proud and defiant, wobbled now toward the bones protruding from her chest. “Me husband’ll surely want me back once he sees I’ve bested you, young and pretty as you are.”

She died one afternoon in the middle of October, and no husband came to mourn her when Darcy found her glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling, having expelled her final breath. At her behest, Doctor Edmund searched Lou’s records for a next of kin to notify. None had been named.

Jane found her in the toilets when their shift ended, unable to fold her tears into her handkerchief any more quietly.

“Shhh,” she whispered, combing back the strands of Darcy’s hair that had come loose. “I know, I know. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m alright,” Darcy sniffled, straightening, and dabbed away the last of her tears. “She...I’ve seen the others come and go, but Lou...I thought she just might end up outliving us all out of spite.”

Jane’s tender smile sparkled in the cracked, dusty mirror, and Darcy leaned into her touch when she reached for her shoulder. “I know.” She drew in a deep breath, brushing her thumb across the tear tracks on her companion’s cheek. “ Come with me? I have something to show you.”

The part of town they lived in was no grand, glistening home, no next-door neighbours who wore furs or boasted inheritances, or even trades that might have earned them a great sum. Certainly, the part of town Darcy and Jane lived in was no palace, but comparatively, it made the alleyways that Jane darted through tonight, her hand closed tight over Darcy’s wrist, look like a slum. Vagabonds lingered in doorways, vulgar noises echoing against the brick as the women passed, the streets smelling of shit and sweat underfoot. Night was darker and colder in this place.

“Where the _hell_ are you taking me?” Darcy hissed, huddling closer as Jane finally ducked into a doorway, where the light revealed them.

“There are places doctors go for their research. Some more available and more...accessible than others. This is the only one that didn’t bat an eye at a woman wanting to do some of her own, so...I come here sometimes.”

“On your own?” Darcy imagined she’d look like a slab of walking, talking meat were she to take these streets by herself. “Jane, why the hell haven’t you told me about this?”

She was led past a group of students peeling apart a cadaver, their sleeves rolled up to their elbows and splashed with blood. A stout man with a long gray beard had a scalpel in his hands, taking apart what appeared to be the sinews of a human leg. Jane’s head was held high, and she looked the man in the eye when she spoke.

“Where is he?” she said sharply, looping her arm through Darcy’s. The man didn’t look up.

“‘Round the back. Dunno why you bother, he ain’t exactly friendly.”

But Jane hadn’t the time nor interest in responding. Instead, she steered Darcy around the corner, stopping once they’d turned its angle. It was a room much like the others, filled with the unholy instruments and stench of death, and a scientist at a table.

Darcy’s arm dropped from her friend’s, and she felt all the air in the world go still, from the ground at her feet to the winds at the tops of the highest mountains. His back was to them, tawny hair unkempt and ruffled against the collar of his shirt, but she would know him anywhere, by the very breath he radiated.

Before he could turn to tell them to leave, she had taken one step, then another, picking up speed in this short distance to meet him as fast as she could, damn the blood, damn the bodies, damn the death in this seedy underbelly of London. He had little time to face her before her arms had slung around his shoulders and her hands had buried themselves in his hair, and at last she could hold him, touch him, feel his embrace around her.

“Darcy?”

_“Victor.”_


End file.
